Document scanners are well known in the art. Generally, document scanners are devices that optically scan a printed page to provide data representative of the scanned page (e.g., a scan file) which data can be stored and/or manipulated, typically by a computer.
Batch scanners, a particular type of document scanner, are becoming more prevalent. In a batch scanner, several documents are gathered together and scanned into a computer all at once. However, unless techniques are employed to discriminate between documents during the scanning process, the scan data resulting from the scanning of the documents will be encompassed by a single scan file. As a result, users of the scan file are not provided with any indication within the scan data where one document ends and another one begins. It thus becomes a manual process for a user to inspect the resulting scan data and determine where various documents begin and end. If the user wishes to store separate documents in separate scan files, he/she must manually separate the documents from the scan data and save them as separate files.
Currently, various techniques are used in order to discriminate when one document ends and another starts, thereby allowing the creation of separate scan files when using a batch scan process. One solution is to include separator pages comprising some type of indicia (e.g., bar codes, predetermined patterns, blank pages, etc.) making them recognizable by the scanner as a separator page. Based on the occurrence of the separator page, separate scan files can be generated, either by the scanner itself or by a computer that receives the scan data. While separator pages function adequately for this purpose, they do require a user to manually insert them between documents. Another solution is to put an indicator marking the first or last page of document directly onto the pages of each of the documents. Again, this solution requires user intervention prior to the scanning operation.
Thus, a need exists for a technique of discriminating between documents during batch processing and that does not require, as in prior art techniques, user intervention or the manual manipulation of the documents prior to batch scanning. Such a technique should preferably allow batch scanning to be automated such that separation between documents in scan files are provided automatically, with user intervention being only optional.